For well over a century, both political parties and a long succession of U.S. leaders have failed to embrace countless opportunities across a variety of areas to make a major contribution to either national society or the world at large. Those failures haunt U.S. society and the world today.

While the U.S. Sleeps looks at six of these areas. In each, the failure to grasp opportunities constitutes a form of sleep, even a lack of basic understanding of the profound implications of rejecting or circumventing those opportunities.

The United States, because of the values that accompanied its birth and those it has espoused, coupled with the evolving socio-economic and political standing of its place in the world since World War I, has achieved much at home and abroad. It has, also, been faced with inadequately addressed problems that have progressively festered and have now become threats to the very life of societies, national and global. 

Efforts to deal with some of them have erringly focused on personalities-specific presidents (Trump, for example); particular political parties; or identified events or movements (1960s radicals or far-Right extremists) rather than on rooted patterns that have shaped and reinforced institutions. 

The book looks at some of those patterns, in the areas of disarmament, economic development, race and class formations, popular culture, the environment, and the will to power. It then proposes some steps toward a possible course correction.